Blog Comments & Posts

Oh man, what a way to start an post. I especially liked "Address the customer directly with “you”; avoid going on a “we” monologue." which I've put on my post-it wall, so thank you for that. Great inclusion of actionable tactics, case studies, and actual studies.

In your Asana example for their onboarding page they use a stock image, which you earlier write off. I'm curious if you (as well as the community) think stock images have a place where used appropriately, and if so where the line between clip art and an image that helps convert is drawn.

I especially appreciate the reference to legitimate web directories that still work. I go a little crazy when I see all the posts saying "directories are dead" when there are plenty of legitimate directories that lead to traffic and conversions regardless of Google. When something gets spammed into oblivion, the tactics more legitimate roots seem to fall by the wayside.

In regards to HARO, I've seen pretty low numbers of successful articles over the past year or so of using it. However, I do think it's worth it for those few diamonds in the rough at some of the bigger news sources that come across, and as a foot in the door for meeting industry reporters. I haven't noticed it being as helpful as it's made out to be, but what is?

I appreciate the studies you use to back up your points. It's easy to say carousels and drop-down menus are bad, but I've always struggled explaining that to clients. The conversation is usually just "they're annoying, your users will hate you." It's always nice to see common practice backed up (or not) with data.

It's interesting because there's so much backlash in mainstream media, schools, etc. about things like cyber-bullying and how people need to realize that there's someone behind a computer while in there actions. I think in reality we're all a bit guilty of it (albeit in a more benign way). It's very easy to forget that behind view statistics, conversions, and location demographics are real people that we are hopefully helping and enriching in some way.

I see this kind of short-term thinking all the time on sites that bombard you with newsletter signups that take over your page as you're just trying to read an article. They must be great for conversions, but they don't leave me as a happy camper. This WBF was a refreshing reminder of the humans on the other side of our marketing efforts, thanks for sharing.

It's great to hear you (or anyone) say that. There are always cries of "SEO is dead" when in reality SEO has just become more complicated, and the rewards are there for those who are willing to play on a higher level. Great WBF!

It's definitely good to see a case study of possible trip ups for Google Authorship. Google's vague guidelines and descriptions makes it easy to blame loss of authorship on the general decrease in authorship, rather than on something small (like another by so-and-so) on your page.

Interesting post -- it seems like Google is moving information away from analytics and towards other properties. Maybe the engineers on WMT and Local Dashboard are looking for some love.

Do you think local landing pages are worthwhile moving forward given Google moving towards recognizing keywords as the entities they represent, rather than just trying to find a match on a well ranked page?